Scavengers (2013)

Ambition is good. Ambition is what keeps the world going. Without it we wouldn't have many of the greatest achievements in human history: The Great Pyramids. The moon landing. Deep fried butter on a stick. The list goes on. But on the other hand, sometimes it's best when to know when to pick your battles, and temper ambition with the cold, hard, stainless steel meat tenderizer of reality.

Take for instance "Scavengers," a 2013 straight to DVD affair with a budget that would have been laughed off an episode of "Firefly," the acting chops and set design of a Sega CD game, and the computer graphics the caliber of "ReBoot." For some reason, they thought that was a perfect setup to make a space opera complete with dogfights and shootouts with lasers and the whole shebang. Now, one can't fault a film for wanting to be more than the sum of its parts, but if the best a film can look like from a production standpoint is an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," then maybe they shouldn't have tried being "Star Trek Into Darkness," you know what I'm saying?

Oh thank Crom. I've been waiting for this since the movie started. Come on. Do it. DO IT! Kill me, I'm here! Kill me! C'mon! Do it now! Kill me!

That's just a thing I've never understood. Perhaps it's just the perfectionist in me talking, but personally if I was going to try and make a film that by Hollywood standards was going to cost on the high end of 8 decimal places, and the most I could get was on the extreme low end of 7, I would reconsider the entire affair. I'd scrap the whole idea and make a horror flick where I didn't have to recreate a dogfight scene from the end of "Return of The Jedi." But again, that's just me because I wouldn't want my end product to suck.

"Scavengers" is about a group of scavengers in space who collect space scrap from space battles in space for space salvage. In the wake of a rather large battle they come across some kind of alien thing called a Chaos Generator (whatever) that does...something, I don't know. The purpose of it is never really made abundantly clear from what I recall, although in the film's defense I stopped paying close attention very early on since I was bored out of my mind.

Which is about the same level of defense as "Say what you want about the slaughter and brutally cruel regime, Sauron kept the place orderly."

They are pursued by Captain Jekel (Sean Patrick Flanery), a psychopathic mercenary who only speaks in grunts and indecipherable mumblings. He's a terrible, one-note character who is impossible to take seriously because of the horrible dialogue and unbelievably bad acting job by Flanery, whom I know can do better than this. Hell, I've seen him do better than this. I have no idea what he's doing in "Scavengers." His sweaty, overly aggressive, blustering and pained performance comes across like a guy who just got kicked in the nuts after drinking a fifth of Wild Turkey. And his dialogue is so stock villain that even when you can understand him it's enough to make your eyes roll. But that's very rare since he's growling, whispering, and slurring all at once with every line.

Every line of Jekel's basically sounds like: "Fwagabala bitdow. Malaga kill 'em all."

I said before how bad this movie looks, and I wasn't lying. I'm dead serious when I say that it looks like an FMV Sega CD game. No joke. This looks like "Sewer Shark." It can't hold a candle to "Wing Commander III." Hell, "Mad Dog McCree" looked better than this. And it's not that it's just low quality, either: It's also lazy as there's a ridiculous amount of recycled shots that just screams out that they just didn't care. There's a rather dangerous drinking game you can do in which you take a drink every time you see the same readout on one of the computer screens. You'll be drunk without 5 minutes because every single time someone looks at a computer screen they show the EXACT. SAME. SHOT. The best part is that they all act as if it's new information every time, making it clear the actors weren't looking at anything, and the readout was put in later by an editor who didn't give a crap.

Apart from that I have no idea what was going on with this movie. There's a scene where a guy explodes, which was awesome because I thought they killed a main character out of nowhere, but that's rendered stupid when we find out he's a clone and they can just make more of him, which they do constantly since he inadvertently kills himself all the time. There's a bar fight with a character named Breathtaker (Kelley Whilden) who is useless expect for the fact that she has a stupid name and they give her a shower scene for no reason. There's a couple dogfights which are incomprehensible and boring. There's a scene where one of the characters is in a crawlspace struggling to reach a button even though it's laughably clear based on the set not having a ceiling that all she would have to do is stand up and it would easily be within reach, which they don't even bother trying to hide. And then the main character just throws the Chaos Generator into space after almost everyone dies because that makes everything we just saw totally worth it. Then the movie ends with Jekel having a piece of it the whole time or some stupid twist that makes no sense.

That's all I remember. And you know what? I don't care enough to refresh my memory. This blew.

Go ahead. check out Flanery's line delivery in the trailer here. Yeah you can laugh at it. You didn't watch this movie. I did. Are you happy that I suffered in your place? Jerks.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Scavengers" is terrible. It's terrible because it's boring, which is the worst kind of terrible because you can't even take any pleasure out of how bad it is. It's what would happen if the Asylum tried to make "Firefly." Just allow that to process in your heads.